Re: star-1.5a64 aborts on reading archives with _small_ garbage tails

Joerg Schilling <[email protected]> wrote:

> > and i added my personal garbage tail
> >   Note: cd_backup_planer added 320 bytes of checksum padding
> >
> > On trying to read the table of content
> >   $ star -t -v </tmp/test2.star
> > i get _half_ my content list and then star aborts
> >   ...
> >       0 lrwxrwxrwx  root/root Jun 12 20:40 2004 lenghty_address
> >   star: Error reading '-' size (320) too small.
> >   star: 15 blocks + 0 bytes (total of 153600 bytes = 150.00k).
>
> This is not a bug but intended behavior on a missusage.
>
> A valid TAR archive is always a multiple of 512 bytes.

Let me add a note:

Other tar implementations and star -no-fifo may not expose this
with a certain probability.

If the two EOF markers in the archive are (depending on the blocksize)
in the same and last block, there may be no problem because
other tars and star -no-fifo would stop readin before seeing the
incorrect block.

As star by default uses  a FIFO and the FIFO process does not know anything
about the archive format, it reads until the real EOF is seen.

Jörg

-- 
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